In 1905 an alabaster skinned man went on an expedition around Lake Victoria area. He was 25 kilometers away from Kisumu when he saw a scatter of Eucalyptus trees in the area he would establish as the construction site for a mission station. The man’s name was Rev. James Jamieson Willis, and he was a missionary with the Church Mission Society. The following year, The Rock of Ages Chapel was established, and the area – which didn’t have a name until then – was named Maseno.
Like all other mission stations, an educational institution was included in the plan. The school was opened in 1906 and was given the name Maseno School, and the motto was ‘Perseverance Shall Win Through’. As was expected, Rev. Willis took on the headmaster role and his first students were six African boys, all sons of chiefs in the area.
The boys attended school faithfully and left with little tales of this new place on the familiar ground where they were taught to read and write. They must have spoken highly or sparked the imaginations of their peers because soon after more boys carried themselves to the mission gates hoping to join the school. Maseno progressively enrolled students in the following months and years. Within the school’s first few years, a student protest was organized and led by Ojijo Oteko – a young man who believed that the African students were receiving the bare minimum education. His fellow students rallied up behind him supported and the protest was the first ever at Maseno School. It wasn’t for nothing though; the end result was a formal curriculum – similar to the ones in the European schools – introduced in 1910.
A decade later a teacher training program was in the works. Rev. Willis ensured that the older Africans were trained as teachers to ease the transition for the new, younger students.
A few years later, in 1928, a teacher with an impeccable reputation was brought in from the UK to work as Maseno School’s headmaster. In his younger years, Edward Carey Francis had served as the head of school and the captain of various sporting teams at William Ellis School in Hampstead. He had later joined the army and was appointed as one of the first lecturers at the faculty of Mathematics at Cambridge University (where he was also an alumnus). He was known for his diligence and stewardship toward discipline making him the right fit for the administration of Maseno School. He abandoned his teaching job, following a call to serve in missionary work and took on his first post as Maseno School’s headmaster. Francis plunged in with a military-style of stewardship and the school soared in discipline and academic performance. At the time, Maseno School offered education up to junior secondary examinations.
The school’s status remained popular for years to come and as it grew into a fully-fledged secondary school, many primary school boys looked forward to pursuing their secondary education at this excellent school.
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